Only if we’re making soup.
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I got $20 on the virus eventually mutating to a form that creates an ideal ACE2 binding.
Sooo, the wet markets probably fostered the perfect environment for a virus to get tossed about by multiple species and mutate to the COVID-19 form that got legs in humans and attention because of human to human transmissions and deaths.
Yes, mutation and selection can occur naturally. That can take many years.
Human researchers have found ways to greatly accelerate the process to generate new viruses in the lab. For example here is a quote from a paper from 2016 that promoted exactly that kind work with bat coronaviruses:
" . . . provide fundamental mechanistic information on how bat CoVs become more pathogenic. A variety of experimental approaches could be used to create such viruses, including animal passage and mutagenesis." Here is a link to the paper:
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/2812
Here is what the paper said about critics of gain-of-function work:
The critics of gain-of-function experiments frequently cite apocalyptic scenarios involving the release of altered viruses and subsequent catastrophic effects on humans. . . Although there have been recent lapses in high-containment biological facilities, none have resulted in harm, and work has gone on for years in many other facilities without incident . . .
(https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/2812#ref-10)). **.
Actually there is good evidence of accidental release of viruses from labs that caused human epidemics:
Human H1N1 virus reappeared in 1977, in the Soviet Union and China. Virologists, using serologic and early genetic tests, soon began to suggest the cause of the reappearance was a laboratory escape of a 1949-50 virus, and as genomic techniques advanced, it became clear that this was true. By 2010, researchers published it as fact: “The most famous case of a released laboratory strain is the re-emergent H1N1 influenza-A virus which was first observed in China in May of 1977 and in Russia shortly thereafter.” The virus may have escaped from a lab attempting to prepare an attenuated H1N1 vaccine in response to the U.S. swine flu pandemic alert.
And SARS was accidentally released several times resulting in multiple deaths:
SARS has not re-emerged naturally, but there have been six escapes from virology labs: one each in Singapore and Taiwan, and four separate escapes at the same laboratory in Beijing. . .
In April 2004, China reported a case of SARS in a nurse who had cared for a researcher at the Chinese National Institute of Virology. While ill, the researcher had traveled twice by train from Beijing to Anhui province, where she was nursed by her mother, a physician, who fell ill and died. The nurse in turn infected five third-generation cases, causing no deaths.
My opinion is that the idea that the new coronavirus emerged naturally without human intervention is remote; sort of like finding a herd of unicorns on a farm and then claiming they were a result of natural evolution. While it is possible it is very unlikely. By comparison, accidental release from a lab is highly likely and explains the features of the virus.
The hypothesis makes no sense. If it has been in humans for a long time it should have been detected unless it was floating around in some third world backwater with zero access to modern medicine.
There’s some fairly strong evidence the Chinese had been working with it in a lab after isolating it from bats at least two years ago and that it passed from a bat to a researcher who then spread it to others in the district which makes far more sens…
